What eventually did happen was something none of the experts ever suggested would be possible. Over time I would lose my memory—almost completely—of things that happened just moments before, and become unable to recall events that happened days and years earlier. To the rest of the world, I would become a young man behaving bizarrely, perhaps drunkenly, and I lacked the ability to acknowledge it, or fully explain what was going on. As it grew, eventually to the size of a small egg, the tumor dug a hole in my consciousness, of ever-increasing depth. I became incapable of living the life I had made for myself.